Messages - bspisak

Running the calcs in BeerSmith, it should have worked for your situation. But then, it's never worked for me either!

Assuming BeerSmith is correct and you hit 162, then your water was really at 185F.

Take it FWIW, but those infusion calcs never worked for me and I never found any better that did. Could be my boiling water was cooling quite a bit on the trip from the stove to the tun out on the back porch.

The colorphast strips are reportedly adequate but read approximately 0.3 too low.

That's about the difference you'll see due to temperature of the mash. Just like gravity, pH readings are temperature dependent. The "ideal" pH of 5.2 is at mash temp, which would make it 5.5 at room temp.

"Barley beta-glucan is receiving increasing attention as a food hydrocolloid (a substance that forms a gel with water). As you know, hydrocolloids are added to foams and emulsions in order to increase the viscosity of the continuous phase, decrease bubble and droplet movement, and slow drainage and creaming. This results in more stable foams and emulsions."

I found another reference to this chicken and egg problem of beta glucanase and beta solubilase activation temperatures.

In The Function of Enzymes in Brewing, Tim O'Rourke talks about it, then goes on to say that "it is common practice in many breweries to add exogenous beta-glucanase to decrease wort and beer viscosity and to improve filterability."

Back to Noonan's statement that small "amounts of beta-glucans ... contribute to a beer's fermentability, body, and foam head." I can see how fermentability and body are affected, but what do we know about head retention as it relates to beta-glucans?

Goldhammer outlines a number of methods in his book The Brewer's Handbook. That link just shows excerpts and he goes into considerably more detail in the book itself.

If you do go the sedimentation route, he says that doing so before you pitch the yeast will lead to better cold break removal: 50% v. 30% from pitched wort.

The flotation method entails bubbling air up through the wort, waiting for it to create a scum on top, then draining the vessel from beneath. He says this can lead to 60-65% removal, but that it requires a flat bottomed vessel to prevent the scum from breaking up and falling back into the wort as it would in a conical. I suppose you could skim instead if using a conical.

He says DE filtration will remove 75-80% on average and up to 95% if using fine DE. However, he also says DE will strip other things from the wort leaving you a less full-bodied beer and there is problems keeping things sterile.

Seems like whirlpooling and racking is your best option unless you want to try skimming from your conical. Or, you could build a flotation tank, centrifuge or go the DE route.

"One of the consequences of forced malting is insufficient hydrolysis of beta-glucans to glucose by beta-glucanase enzymes which are denatured above 140F and do not usually survive kilning.... With reasonably well converted malt, manageable amounts of beta-glucans may be liberated from hemicellulose by proteolytic enzymes during a 95-113F (35-45C) mash rest and contribute to a beer's fermentability, body, and foam head."

Palmer in How to Brew, 3rd pp145 says,

"Most of the beta glucan in barley is degraded during malting (from 4 to 6% by weight to less than 0.5%) ... for well-modified malts."

What this seems to be saying is that for well-modified malts, beta-glucanase has been denatured and is no longer available to break down the 0.5% of remaining beta-glucans. However, by resting the mash at 95-113F the proteolytic (!?) enzymes will free up these remaining beta-glucans such that they can contribute to a beer's fermentabilty, body and head.

I would think an extract version would come close, but since you have to mash carapils, you may be lacking some of the malty body it gives. Also, if you're doing a partial boil, your hop utilization will be different, but just plug it all into Beersmith or Pro-Mash.

I've been wanting to set up a C02 push system and really like the flare fitting screwed into the carboy hood. Nice!

On the keg side, why not just use a standard keg fitting and hook up the beer line from the carboy to the OUT side of the keg? You can vent the keg either by removing the top, loosening the IN side, or simply using an IN fitting with no line attached.